‘The world changed, the high street changed – it started to become Uber-fied… There’s that chain reaction, throw in a bit of Brexit, say the B-word, confidence goes and people’s habits changed.’

But can Brexit really be blamed? Since the Brexit vote, rising wages have held up strong consumer spending. So consumers have more cash in their pockets and are willing to part with it – they just don’t want to give it to Jamie Oliver. Why could that be?

Before Oliver blamed Brexit, he had another excuse: snobbery. Apparently, people didn’t want to go to Jamie’s because it wasn’t ‘posh’ enough. ‘If I’d have spent 13 years opening posh restaurants, I could assure you they’d all be open today’, he said to You magazine.

It’s a bit rich for Oliver to complain about snobbery, when he is the real snob here. His concerns about ‘unhealthy’ food are dripping with class snobbery. Over the years, he has said that poor, obese people ‘think in a different gear’. He has called working-class parents who give their kids fizzy drinks ‘arseholes’, ‘tossers’ and ‘idiots’. And in unguarded outbursts he has moaned about poor people having big TVs, getting drunk on weekends, and not sitting around the table for dinner. ‘Their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves’, he once said in an interview.

Thanks to his school-dinners crusade, a whole generation blames Oliver for depriving them of their beloved Turkey Twizzlers. Others blame his sugar-tax campaigning for ruining the taste of popular soft drinks like Irn Bru and Lucozade.

Jamie Oliver’s restaurants going bust? Good, that’s what you get for ruining irn bru and original lucozade ya cunt

James Knight

21st August 2019 at 5:49 pm

What is even more hilarious is all those who are beholden to every Trump tweet offending by the suggesting he would “buy” Greenland.

Many of these are the very first people who want to sell out UK sovereignty for extra cash and claim a mandate to stop no deal because “nobody voted to be worse off”. If they were Greenlanders they’d sell out their own country in heart-beat.

Andy Bolstridge

21st August 2019 at 3:49 pm

He opened his Italian restaurants in Edinburgh – a city famous for Italian restaurants. No wonder the competition was too strong. If he’d opened Jamie’s Lebanese or something he’d probably still be going today.

I am sympathetic to his “snobbish” stance on rubbish food though, it wasn’t against the poor, it was against eating awful crap. Big difference.

Amin Readh

21st August 2019 at 3:45 pm

“He has called working-class parents who give their kids fizzy drinks ‘arseholes’, ‘tossers’ and ‘idiots’.”

He is hardly wrong though. Just because you are working class, how does that mean lack of brains to not eat trashy foods. In truth, there is no such “working class” – rather there is an underclass that will always be there.

Ven Oods

21st August 2019 at 1:51 pm

‘If I’d have spent 13 years…’

…reading books, my English grammar would be immeasurably better, said Mr Oliver, whose Italian is no better.

Bill Cook

21st August 2019 at 1:35 pm

I ate on one of Jamie’s Italians way back when they first opened. The food was excellent, came in reasonably priced generous portions and the staff were enthusiastic and attentive. Two years later, the food was only edible, came in small overpriced portions and the staff seemed to view the customer as an inconvenience. Whatever decisions he made in those two years were to blame for the chain’s collapse, nothing else. I don’t hate him, but he is a self-important ass who has come to believe his own publicity and has lost any insight he may once have had into the lives of the working classes.

Alex May

21st August 2019 at 12:11 pm

His restaurants in Australia went into administration (with Jamie choosing not settling its debts out of his own vast wealth). The common denominator seems to be him, not Brexit. Guy’s a phoney, a preacher and an idiot

Jim Lawrie

21st August 2019 at 12:03 pm

They couldn’t do the simplest of Italian dishes – spaghetti alla carbonara, although they were able to do it in.
To quote an Italian chef “What they do not understand abroad is that Italian cooking has few ingredients.” Might I add that this dish calls for perfect timing, enough salt when boiling the spaghetti, an understanding of how food continues to cook in the receding heat once the gas is switched off, and how straight from the fridge affects the cooking. Dolloping on cream, butter and soft cheese is a healthy admission of defeat.

Mr Oliver role in this mess is revealed when he cites “throw in a bit of Brexit” and a consequent loss of confidence as major factors in his demise. So, à la Remainer, he thinks we are stupid.

An opportunistic wee fatso whose faux Cockney accent sums up him and his view of us, and whose vanity had edited out of his own TV shows below the chest shots showing his gut.

You would have to have been one stuck up barsteward to have invested in this dog’s dinner.

Who ate all the paella Jamie?

Robert Lenton

21st August 2019 at 1:02 pm

Oliver specialises in failed projects that aim to enlighten the deploarable mob. For example, after poking his nose into children’s school lunch boxes he decided they would be better off eating poached gurnard, Puy lentils and braised cime di rapa prepared by the school. But the kids turned their noses up, preferring to go hungry. Instead, they arranged with their parents for food they wanted to eat to be smuggled through the school perimeter fence at lunchtime. I’m not sure, but suspect it was such independent enterprise that moved Oliver to describe offending parents as ‘fucking idiots’.
Also, have you seen how he has larded up over the past few years? What’s that all about?

Jim Lawrie

21st August 2019 at 6:09 pm

I don’t know what he is gorging on, but sure as eggs are eggs, it’ll be somebody else’s fault.

Here he shows the oiks how to hold a newborn. In a photo opportunity he holds the baby at a similar angle to cover his kite. He then went on to inflict the name “buddy bear maurice” on the poor boy. He might as well have called him Sue, because later in life that is just what he’ll do.

Captain Scott

21st August 2019 at 11:50 am

I live in a coastal town with a thriving restaurant scene. Fortunately Oliver never opened here but two big chain restaurants have recently closed in the town, whilst all the independents appear to be doing rather well. Maybe people want to eat something special and local, rather than a facsimile of every other restaurant in the country.

Jonathan Yonge

21st August 2019 at 9:59 am

I can’t think of any particular selling point for Oliver’s food. It doesn’t specialize in anything, and you can get Italian food from real Italians.
Why go and just eat food when you could have an Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Steak, Fish… ?
People want something special and different, or if not that then cheap.
Oliver doesn’t tick any boxes and he’s expensive.
Also I am put off by his smugness on TV, and declarations of vigorous love-life.

Bri -an

21st August 2019 at 12:27 pm

Some of these reataurants are open. Here in Holland I have been to one in The Hague, reasonable price, well served but, without the name, I would never have guessed it was Italian

Raymond McCarthy

21st August 2019 at 9:44 am

My family ate at the Bristol branch.
The food was very poor, vastly overpriced.

The staff were just pushing extras all the time.

Not one of the 10 of us would eat in one again.
And the market agreed with the chains closure.

No fault but his own.

Jerry Owen

21st August 2019 at 9:06 am

I have never eaten at one of his restaurants, but I understand his food is quite frankly rubbish. he has failed because his food simply just doesn’t cut it.
We eat out twice a week, Brexit hasn’t affected us and it hasn’t affected anybody else that I know.
He’s just a bad loser !

Robert Lenton

21st August 2019 at 9:05 am

It’s true that Oliver is a shit house. But the most likely explanation for his failure is that the food wasn’t worth the money. If we consider that a lot of Oliver’s restaurants were located in places (London, Brighton, Oxford etc) dominated by the new liberal class, then his snobbishness doesn’t explain people’s decision to stay away from his restaurants.This is because Oliver’s loathing of the common herd would have been felt no less acutely by many of those who have eaten his food. But whatever the explanation, I’m glad he failed. And I’m enjoying his spiteful outrage.